What I won't do, and who I'm not for.
Most service pages oversell. This one tries to disqualify you. If you read it and want to send your deck anyway, that's the right signal.
A practice is what it refuses to do.
Most service businesses describe themselves by what they do. Decks, narratives, investor prep, GTM, hiring plans. The list is generous and so are the implied yeses. The problem is that yes is a low-information signal. Every consultancy says yes to everything inside their stated practice; the surface area of capability is roughly the same across firms.
The actual shape of a practice — the part that determines the work, the price, the client mix, and the failure modes — lives in the no's. What gets refused is a higher-information signal than what gets advertised, because refusals carry cost. A consultant who turns down equity in lieu of fees is making an explicit statement about their incentive structure. A consultant who turns down hourly engagements is making an explicit statement about scope discipline. These are not policies; they are the practice rendered as decisions a founder can verify.
What follows are ten refusals, each one earned. Most came from a mistake I made in the first year of running this practice and didn't repeat. They are written down so I don't drift, and so you know what you're buying — and what you can't buy from me — before the first call. If you read the list and conclude that we're not the right fit, that's the list working as intended. The cost of a wrong-fit engagement is higher than the cost of a missed one, for both sides.
Two columns. Find yours honestly.
- Pre-seed to Series A, $1M–$15M round.
- You have a working draft of a deck, however rough.
- You can name your first customer profile in one sentence.
- You want to sit in the file with me, not be handed a finished asset.
- You'd rather hear what's broken than what's polite.
- Pre-team, pre-deck, pre-thesis. Come back with a draft.
- Series B+ — find a banker.
- You want a designer. The grid is the last 10% here.
- You want someone to tell you the deck is great. It probably isn't yet.
- You expect a turnaround in 48 hours with no live sessions.
Things I say no to, every engagement.
Each of these has a story behind it. Most are mistakes I made in the first year of running this practice. They're written down so I don't drift, and so you know what you're buying before you ask.
- Refusal 01
I won't ghostwrite a deck.
If you can't sit through three working sessions and put your hands on the file, the deck won't survive partner Q&A two weeks later. The point of the engagement is for you to leave able to defend every line. I will not write it for you and hand it back.
- Refusal 02
I won't take equity in lieu of fees.
Two reasons. First, advisor cap-table noise is a tell at the next round. Second, I want the incentive to tell you the truth on the third call, not the convenient version. Cash makes that easier. I take Stripe.
- Refusal 03
I won't run on retainer.
Open-ended retainers reward me for staying expensive and you for not finishing. Every engagement is fixed scope, fixed price, fixed end date. If you want more after, we scope a new one with a clear delta.
- Refusal 04
I won't take a success fee on the round.
Success fees from non-broker-dealers are legally fraught and ethically muddier. More to the point, my advice should not change because your round is closing hot. Same fee whether you raise in three weeks or six months.
- Refusal 05
I won't sign a one-way NDA at the cold-deck stage.
I read three to five decks a week. A one-way NDA from a stranger is unenforceable and signals you don't know how the market works. Mutual NDAs once we're past first call are fine.
- Refusal 06
I won't subcontract the work.
There is no design pod, no junior, no offshore deck shop. The person on the call is the person rewriting the slides. If you need a forty-person agency that runs three decks at once, I'm the wrong shop.
- Refusal 07
I won't rebuild your financial model from scratch.
I'll read the model, pressure-test it against the deck, and tell you where the bottom-up math doesn't survive a partner. I won't build the seven-tab model itself. That's a CFO project.
- Refusal 08
I won't pitch your deck to investors.
I am not a placement agent and I do not run intros for fee. If we work together and an intro happens to make sense after, I'll make it. The engagement is the work, not the rolodex.
- Refusal 09
I won't work with founders who can't articulate the wedge in one call.
Not because the wedge has to be obvious — most aren't — but because the working sessions only work if you can answer 'who is this for, doing what, instead of what?' If we get to the second call and that's still vague, we cancel. I refund the kickoff.
- Refusal 10
I won't water down the read.
If your traction is small, I'll say small. If your TAM math doesn't hold, I'll say it doesn't hold. The cost of a polite read is a slow round. You're not paying me to be friendly. You're paying me to be the harshest reader in your inbox before a partner is.
Still here? Send the deck.
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